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The heroine of Léonor Serraille’s film comes across, at points, as a vulnerable, deluded individual and at others an enviably free spirit confronting the world’s hypocrisies. Is the trope of female messiness feminist or quite the reverse, asks Hannah McGill?
Wednesday 23 May 2018

Banned by the Ceaușescu regime from stage work but never deflected from his critiques of his country, Romania’s great film and theatre director was, in his implacable and subversive scepticism, a role model for the country’s cinematic new wave, writes Nick Roddick.
Wednesday 23 May 2018

Cannes Film Festival 2018

Marcello Fonte won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his role as a big-hearted but beleagued dog sitter who tries to turn worm in Matteo Garrone’s gimlet-eyed Roman revenger. John Bleasdale reviews.
Saturday 19 May 2018

Salvation is barely a twinkle in the eye of pre-teen scrabbler Zain, driven to sue his parents for bringing him in to a life of destitution in Nadine Labaki’s furious, tumultuous Lebanese drama, writes Caspar Salmon.
Saturday 19 May 2018

Toronto’s international documentary film festival showcased a series of films that reckon with our moment of sexual-relations redress – offering a vision of creative nonfiction as a space to transcend victimhood, writes Simran Hans.

Sam Green grew tired of making “fixed and permanent” documentaries, so now he performs them – his latest, A Thousand Thoughts, alongside its subjects the legendary Kronos Quartet. He talks to Robert Greene about the history, economics and politics of standup cinema.

From a Parisian high school and Berlin’s airport to a Portuguese fisherman and Uruguyuan street protesters, the best films at the 40th edition of Paris’s international documentary festival found ways to engage with their chosen realities as much as with their own artistic complexities, reports Celluloid Liberation Front.

Away from the ersatz, self-satisfied rebelliousness of Reaganite pop teen movies, a more independent strain of US cinema scratched at the darkness on the edge of mainstream adult society. Christina Newland revisits the orphans of the American Dream.

In the hands of 45 Years director Andrew Haigh, Willy Vlautin’s story of a boy and a horse reversing the Oregon trail on a self-rescue mission has big vistas and better interior drama, says Philip Kemp.

The Arrietty director has teamed up with fellow Studio Ghibli veteran Nishimura Yoshiaki to start a new company, and fittingly their first film is all about taking a leap into the unknown, they tell Andrew Gutman.

This year’s festival contains a paradoxical set of films that merge progression and retrospection to mind-bending effect, from the imaginatively unhinged mind games of Nothing Really Happens to movies exploring retrofuturism, resurrection and regression, writes Anton Bitel.

Marvel’s most bumper saga yet harks back to 1940s serials with its many-chaptered ambition to crowbar every super hero and villain possible into a superfranchise. Its vistas are almost as impressive as its vaulting ambition, says Kim Newman.

A violent controversy over the award-winning South African film The Wound points to a tense global debate about the rights of indigenous peoples to protect their collective forms of cultural expression. Where does the defence of traditional culture become censorship, asks Bertrand Moullier?

From Repulsion to Blowup and beyond, 1960s movies made in Britain by foreign directors had something unsettling to tell us about a nation in flux – a warning that may yet reflect on our Brexit era, writes Brad Stevens.

With a curl of her lip and an arch of her eyebrow, Gloria Grahame was the actress who stood up to both Humphrey Bogart and Lee Marvin in their most violent roles. In this video essay, Serena Bramble explores the burn mark Grahame left on the silver screen.